Longrider

The concept of a voluntary code for bloggers (read; they would like it to be compulsory) has been burping about for a while now. Via The Englishman, I see that the Torygraph has regurgitated it today:

A voluntary code of conduct for bloggers and internet commentators is supported by almost half of all internet users, a survey has claimed.

The researchers said 46 per cent of web users believe bloggers should agree to a set of guidelines which reflected the laws on defamation, intellectual property rights and incitement.

Four per cent strongly opposed the suggestion and 15 per cent had no opinion.

Like the Englishman, I am one of the four percent. I own this site. I decide what is published. My comments policy covers such things as libel and that, frankly, is sufficient. If you don’t like it, go elsewhere. I do not need a voluntary code and will never sign up for one. Ever. Clear?

In the Englishman’s comments, MarkS asks cui bono? The answer, it seems, is a law firm. Well, ain’t that a surprise?

I repeat; I own this blog. It is a private space; you are here as a guest. I decide what is published. If you, as a guest, do not like what I write, then you don’t have to read it. I don’t engage in libellous comment (at least, not knowingly and if my attention was drawn to it, I’d take the appropriate action), so to those who would want me to sign up for a blogging code, I would merely ask; What part of “never” do you not understand?

Via Rachel, I came across the unfortunate story of Natalie who has been misrepresented by the Daily Mail. Natalie is, unsurprisingly, angry and upset by this. The journalist engaged in a ten minute phone interview and then went to press.

On April 30th just after 3.30pm, I snatched up my phone and bit the bullet. I called up the journalist that had ‘interviewed’ me (I say this loosely) and expressed my upset at her not actually stating that she was interviewing me and my concern that I would be included in a feature about revenge, which is not what I, or this blog are about. I told her quite shrilly (I was stressed for fecks sake) that I did NOT want to open the paper and see something like “Blogger gets revenge on ex with her blog!” or some other pathetic headline.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened. Why am I not surprised by this? Newspapers want to sell copy and, frankly, bad news or news about people behaving badly tends to sell rather better than “blogger writes about self help for women”. E-venge is sooo much more sexy. So, e-venge it was. Natalie also tells us that there were 26 inaccuracies in the article. Again, I am not surprised. If my railway career taught me anything it is that journalists are incapable of accurate, factual reporting. They either get it wrong through sheer ignorance or twist it to make the story appear more salacious than it really is. I lose count of the times following the Paddington crash when a journalist would spout utter bollocks about signal sighting like they knew anything about the subject.

I also recall a colleague who fell victim to having her words “twisted by knaves to make traps for fools”; in her case, it was the Sun. She was angry and devastated to find herself splashed across its wretched pages. It took a long time for her to get over the sense of anger and betrayal.

As a signalling manager, it was my responsibility to attend incidents. Journalists have a habit of turning up at incidents looking for a juicy story, and an unguarded comment could lead to a damaging headline. Therefore, we were under strict instructions not to talk to the press unless we were media trained. More recently, I was contacted by Channel 4 following one of my articles about the legality of dress codes in the workplace; in particular, about men with long hair. She wanted me to appear on a reality TV show; The Salon as they were planning a feature on men with long hair. She was disappointed and bemused when I flatly refused. I did so for exactly the same reason that my Railtrack employers insisted that I did not speak to the press when attending incidents; an unguarded comment can be taken out of context and twisted out of its original meaning and used against the utterer. I would have no editorial control, therefore, I would have no control over how I would appear on the finished piece. It would have been easy to make me look foolish with subtle editing. No, thankyou, very much.

For much of his life, Freddie Mercury refused to talk to newspapers. His line was simple enough; they are going to make it up anyway, so they don’t need help from me. It was a stance he maintained until a day or so before his death. It is a wise stance and one worth emulating.

It’s a bit late for Natalie, but for any other bloggers out there, I have one important piece of advice; take a deep breath and pause if you are asked for an interview. Ask yourself if you really want to do this. I know it is flattering and you are looking at your fifteen minutes of fame, but they are not thinking of you, they are thinking of their copy, of selling newspapers. You are just a means to that end; a pawn in their game. Is that fifteen minutes of fame worth a damaged reputation and the heartache that goes with it? If you take one piece of advice away from this site, then take this; never, ever, talk to the press. Oh, and don’t buy the Daily Mail, but that’s a given, isn’t it?

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Footnote: Natalie has complained to the Press Complaints Commission, but she is also trying to get this story on as many blogs as possible to set the story straight. This is my contribution.

I appear to have stirred up a hornet’s nest with my recent dissection of Charlie Brooker’s dire little piece in the groan the other day. Which is interesting, given that similar scathing commentary has gone largely unremarked in the past.

Anyway, first up was PigDogFucker who thinks my writing is “mediocre” and that I have misunderstood Brooker’s “satire”. Well, old bean, if mine’s mediocre, what does that make yours? I was well aware that Brooker was attempting humour. However, for satire to work it has to be both funny and clever. Brooker fails on both counts – I’ll come back to the humour in a moment.

Incidentally, while I am prepared to acknowledge constructive feedback, PDF’s feedback will be treated with the contempt it deserves; not because he likens my writing to that of Richard Littlejohn (it’s nothing like), but because of his claim that I am insane – or, more specifically, slightly less insane than Littlejohn. I don’t much like Littlejohn and I don’t agree with many of his views, but he is not insane and my mental health is perfectly fine, too. Accusing me of being mentally unstable places PDF firmly in the Neil Harding school of idiocy. Harding thinks my mental health is askew as well because I happen to disagree with him. In this case, I am apparently, paranoid, because I disagree with the Identity Cards Act. And, talking of idiots, Harding came up with this little gem:

Well I do and I agree with Brooker that hating the Tories is probably the most natural activity anybody could partake in.

Neil doesn’t do critical thinking, nor rational argument. Certainly he doesn’t allow his limited judgement to become clouded by facts, reason or logic. Even as a paid-up member of the Labour party, I didn’t hate the Tories; I disagreed with their policies. Only someone who is incredibly stupid would confuse the two.

Going back for a moment to PDF and his comments about satire:

Both of them seem distraught at Charlie’s suggestion that:

Now, even if the Standard photographs Ken carving a swastika into a dormouse’s back, I’ll vote for him…

I become distraught when someone close to me dies. I do not become distraught because Charlie Brooker writes a juvenile piece in the Groan. Get a sense of perspective, please. Brooker wrote a dire article. Had I, at the age of around twelve, turned such an article in to my English teacher, it would have been bounced back covered in red ink. She would, quite rightly, have demanded that I back up my assertions, that I follow through my arguments and that I lay off the stupid LOL cats commentary at the very least. However, this was not a twelve year old English student’s homework (despite the obvious similarity); it was an article in a national newspaper – and the Groan should be thoroughly ashamed to print such utter, utter tripe.

Moving back to the humour. I do appreciate that humour is a personal thing. What has me clutching my sides will leave another stony faced and vice versa. After all, there are people who think “My Family” is funny. However, even if you don’t find the joke funny, good humour stands out as such. Well written humour is conducted with a deft touch, lightly seasoned understatement and juxtaposition of the serious with the absurd – in short, it requires a skill Charlie Brooker clearly lacks. So, putting Brooker’s piece to the test suggested by Hot Ginger and Dynamite, let’s see how he does, shall we?

1) Is this supposed to be funny?

Yes, and it is funny. Next.

Except that it isn’t. Not even remotely. It is, in fact, a very poor over-egged effort. If you find it funny, you are probably the type of person who thinks shouting “bum” very loudly in a quiet room is funny. Or maybe you still think whoopee cushions are the height of sophisticated humour? Charlie Brooker’s humour is suffering from arrested development – arrested when he was still in short trousers. It isn’t funny, it isn’t clever and as such fails spectacularly as satire.

2) “Fisking”.

Except it’s not, it’s just writing a variant on “I hate you” under every line that Brooker’s written.

Then you were not paying attention, because, like PDF and Neil Harding you missed the raison d’etre of the critique. It wasn’t difficult to catch – indeed, it was mentioned in the opening paragraphs. And, for the record, I do not hate Charlie Brooker; I despise his bigotry.

3) Sulking and hurling accusations.

“Bigoted against Tories”. Sweet Infant Christ save me.

I don’t sulk and nor did I on this occasion. I simply deplore bigotry. Who they are bigoted for or against is irrelevant. Brooker is a bigot – he admits as much in the article. His unthinking tribalism is what I despise. I don’t much like any of our major political parties and with good reason – their policies stink (and as a consequence I really don’t care over much who wins the mayoral elections in May). That doesn’t mean that any one of them cannot come up with a decent proposal from time to time and they all have. Unlike Brooker, I can open my mind to the possibility that people with whom I disagree politically might just have something interesting to say. Unfortunately, Neil Harding, Pigdogfucker and Hot Ginger and Dynamite managed to miss that little nuance.

I’ll save the final word for someone commenting here under the name of higson prime ordinance:

hahaha Brooker’s piece sounds excellent, i’ll have to read it. Thanks for the heads up.

Far funnier and more accuratre than your desperate, angry little rant anyway.

You sound like a right twat

And you, sir, are obviously a cretin. After all, how do you know it is funnier and more accurate if you haven’t read it yet?

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Edit: Yet again, I notice that these commenters refer to me as a right-winger or “rightie”. Yet again, I will point out to the hard of thinking that I am to the economic left of all three major UK parties. I am currently where the LibDems were in about 1999.

Via The Englishman; this comment from Rachel Johnson in the Times:

I don’t get blogging. It’s not only that I’m reluctant to write for nothing.

Mm. I write occasionally for money – for a bike magazine. Then, I expect a decent rate for my words. I write here for nothing because I like writing and it gives me the impetus to hone my skills. If you enjoy writing, the being paid is largely by the by – writing doesn’t make us rich; or at least that is the case for most of us. We do it because we enjoy it, just as others enjoy watching sport, flying kites and building model railways. It’s a hobby. We don’t need a deep reason for doing it, we just do. No one expects you to understand or “get it”.

There are all those people who ask, “Do you blog?” at parties (our own sad neutered version of the “Do you swing?” question), and who warble about “wikis” and “web presence”.

Rachel must move in strange circles. No one has asked me if I blog, let alone swing. Perhaps I don’t go the the right parties. Any chance of an invite next time?

Still, a few weeks ago I started to write one. It’s very easy - even a middle-aged woman can do it. I wrote about what I was making for supper that night. And food shopping in the Portobello market. Then I checked to see the global response to my debut. Nothing. On my next five posts? Zero comments.

She really doesn’t get it, does she? I was rattling away at the keyboard for months before my first comment and even now, several posts can pass without any interaction from others. It doesn’t undermine the activity though. Ultimately, I am writing for me, because I want to, because, hopefully, my craft will improve. Comments are nice – unless they are trolls – but not essential.

Then I really pulled out the stops. I wrote about how my husband shouted, “Free Konnie Huq!”, and I gave an eyewitness account of how a former Blue Peter presenter, that is, a celebrity, was actually touched by a civilian. And after all that unpaid work, was the web on fire? Once again – nul comments.

Perhaps no one is interested? Frankly, the Olympics and everything to do with them are a dull, tedious and mind-numbingly banal waste of time. Perhaps I am not alone in that assessment. I don’t even know who Konnie Huq is (let alone care) – well, I didn’t. I do now (know, not care – I still don’t give a toss). I’m not sure that I feel enlightened by the knowledge, though. Why, therefore, should I be bothered if Konnie Huq is touched by a grubby little prole? You people are so far up your own arses you could lick your tonsils.

I don’t get it. There are the blogs that work – such as Judith O’Reilly’s brilliant blog turned book Wife in the North, or the riveting Petite Anglaise, or our own Alpha Mummy (on Times Online; a treat) – where you sense that the authors are releasing themselves with feeling into the ether. This is because blogging is about regularity, I presume. You have to post every day. You have to be totally committed.

Er, regularity helps – people will be looking for fresh material – but, and if Rachel doesn’t get this point, she is in the wrong job; you have to write something that is fresh and interesting. And, importantly, you have to build a body of work so that the search engines start to pick it up and so that people drop by and start linking. Then, when you’ve been at it a few months, people will look upon you as someone they want to visit on a regular basis and engage in conversation. A bit like real life, I suppose. It doesn’t just happen, you have to put in a bit of effort.

In California people have started to blog themselves to death and The New York Times is reporting stress, sleep disturbance and exhaustion among the “blogging community”.

More fool them.

Well, there is no danger of me having a coronary at my laptop triggered by exhaustion and anxiety about page hit rates. It’s quick and easy to start a blog, as I’ve discovered. It’s even quicker and easier to stop.

That, m’dear, is because you never really started, did you? Once more we have a professional journo making asinine comments on a subject on which they are staggeringly ignorant. No change there, then.

Georgina Henry over at the Groan’s comment is twaddle thinks it should win a webby:

Comment is free has been shortlisted for the second year running for a prestigious Webby award (for best politics blog), alongside guardian.co.uk (shortlisted for best newspaper on the web for the fifth year running) and our podcasts. The reason for blowing our own trumpet is that aside from the official award (to be announced in a couple of weeks) all nominees are in the running for a people’s choice award in their category.

Georgina exhorts us to nip over and vote.

You’re joking, right? This is the “blog” (for want of a better word) that spews ill-informed rhetoric from uninspired, uninspiring and ignorant hacks that occasionally produces a half decent, readable article (usually by Henry Porter). Even if I thought awards are a good thing – and I don’t, they are a waste of time, effort and money for the benefit of mutual back-slapping – I wouldn’t vote for the Groan. Ever.

Looks like I have netted my first troll. So far, after blogging for nigh on four years, I’ve managed to escape the brain-dead numb-skulls of the type that infest other bloggers from time to time.

It seems that my post on Max Mosely yesterday struck a nerve. IAN – for he comments in capital letters and is therefore a cretin –  felt sufficiently incensed by my comments to flame me.

A brief reminder of my comments policy may be in order here. Unlike others, I do not keep troll comments in place. They devalue the conversation. If you are too stupid to put together a reasoned, thought through comment, preferring instead to shout your puerile insults at me with no input to the discussion, then your comment will be deleted and you will be summarily banned. There is no right of appeal as I don’t tolerate wilful stupidity.

As it happened, IAN’s comment popped into my in-box within a minute or so of it being posted as I was online at the time. So, to IAN, fuckwit extraordinare; congratulations, within the space of three minutes you made an arse of yourself, got your comment zapped and got banned from further commenting. That has to be a record.

Jackie Ashley complains – among other things – about the state of blogging.

Again, I am speaking impressionistically, not scientifically: but has not the rise of the internet coincided with a rise of the men’s magazine culture? Blogworld is the future, and it will not be resisted; but at this stage in its development, it seems dominated by rightwing male individualists and libertarians.

Yes? And? So?*

Sigh… Again – and I am speaking impressionistically, not scientifically, you understand; this may be because, unlike hacks working in the conventional media, we reflect the real world, inhabited by people who go out to work in real jobs, earn a real wage and have a huge chunk of it snaffled by Brown’s Mafia, which is then pissed up the wall – and we are sick of it, just as we are sick of them poking about in our lifestyles; telling us how to live our lives. The rise of libertarian bloggers is, perhaps, a reasonable backlash. Of course, like Mr E, I would love to see more female libertarian bloggers.

If you really must read Ashley’s dire dirge that simply churns over the old poor-hard-done-by wimmin argument, then by all means do – but bear in mind that her measure of excellence involves learning the limbo. And, of course, it’s all from an impressionistic perspective, so expect no facts and just a snifter of hypocrisy.

Contrary to Jackie Ashley’s accusations, I make judgements about our deplorable politicians based on their performance, not their gender. The Labour front bench is a microcosm of equality in action as far as I am concerned – they are all unintelligent, brain-dead, personality-challenged, illiberal, self-serving, avaricious, controlling, nannying, incompetent, supercilious bastards - every one of them.

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*Actually, Ashley’s statement in its entirety is apparently factually inaccurate (surprise). Mens’ magazine sales of the type she derides have been declining since about the same time that blogging started to rise. I am unaware of any correlation and would not be foolish enough to try to draw one. I am not, after all, a Guardian hack.

Despite its relative lack of nuance, every so often I re-take the political compass test to see how I stand. It rarely varies. As is usual, I’m slightly right of centre libertarian. No surprise there. And, just as a reminder from this mornings discussion, it does provide some objective evidence that libertarians are not of the far right… In this case, further to the left, in fact, than Gordon Brown.